That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part VI: Deniers and Babiy Yar massacre (4)

John Ball's argument has been uncritically accepted by many deniers. Here are just some "revisionist" sources happily swallowing Ball's BS: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Etc. Suckers.

One source should interest us in particular - the book about Treblinka by our favorite victims, Mattogno and Graf. In a review of this book Graf writes:

Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transfer Camp? is mostly the work of Carlo Mattogno, since he edited seven of the nine chapters. I am the author of the first and fifth chapter, and the introduction and conclusion...

I.e. the author of the chapter we've been discussing in this series is Carlo Mattogno. Of course, Graf himself also wrote about Babiy Yar in The Giant with Feet of Clay and Holocaust or Hoax? claiming that the "case of Babi Yar provides an irrefutable proof of the falseness of these Operational Reports", rehashing arguments of Tiedemann and Ball, and generally spouting the usual uninspired nonsense. But Graf is a lesser half of the duo, Mattogno being the main researcher and a "mastermind". So someone could expected a somewhat more refined analysis from him. Oh boy, would that someone be in for a disappointment!

Read more!

I guess it should be mentioned only in passing that Mattogno finds Ball and Tiedemann credible:

"e. Babi Yar
In the “Activity and Situation Report no. 6 of the Einsatzgruppen of the Securty Police and the SD in the USSR,” we read this concerning the time period from October 1 to 31, 1941:595 “In Kiev all the Jews were arrested and on September 29 and 30, a total of 33,771 Jews were executed.” This deals with the (in)famous ‘Massacre of Babi Yar.’ However, as Udo Walendy and Herbert Tiedemann have proved, this did not happen, at least not remotely in the scope claimed.596 Presumable near Kiev, as in Simferopol, several hundred people were shot. We will come back to the case of Babi Yar.
595 102-R. IMT, Vol. XXXVIII, pp. 292f.
596 Udo Walendy, “Babi Jar - Die Schlucht ‘mit 33,771 murdered Jews’?”, in: Historische Tatsachen
no. 51, Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, Vlotho 1992. Herbert
Tiedemann, “Babi Jar: Critical Questions and Comments”, in: Germar Rudolf (ed.), op. cit.
(note 81), pp. 501-528."

On September 26, the Luftwaffe took an aerial photograph of the area, in which Babi Yar was located. John Ball has published it with the following commentary:[...]
Regarding an enlarged section of the same photograph, Ball says:[...]
Ball deduces from this:[...]
These findings have all the more value since, according to the sole witness, the cremation of the bodies in Babi Yar is supposed to have been completed on September 25 or 26, corresponding to the same day or the day before the air photos were taken.

Then pure idiocy begins:

This Vladirmir K. Davidov is apparently the only witness who claims to have participated in the cremation of bodies of Babi Yar. His tale is wholly unbelievable. The number of bodies - 70,000 - is more than double the number shot according to the Event Report, which in itself is already hugely excessive.

"Apparently the only witness". This alone disqualifies Mattogno from being a serious researcher. This means that he did not take pains to study the available literature on the massacre and the following events. Here's a (probably incomplete) list of literature available at the time Mattogno wrote this phrase, which contains testimonies of Sonderkommandos other than Davydov:

• the 1993 book with the Russian, English and German versions of the testimonies of Babiy Yar Sonderkommandos Jakov Kaper and David Budnik, edited by the Babiy Yar researcher Erhard Roy Wiehn and published by Hartung-Gorre Publishers, D-78465 Konstanz/Germany (Hartung.Gorre@t-online.de) under ISBN 3-89191-666-3 (last time I checked it was still available);


• the English translations from this book, available at http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/content.htm, at least since 1999;


• the Russian edition of Babyi Yar Sonderkommando Zakhar Trubakov's memoir, available at http://www.geocities.com/svr_2000svr_us/bkv/ at least since 2000;


• Anatolij Kuznetsov's excellent Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, from which Mattogno could learn that when Kuznetsov was writing the book, at least nine Sonderkommandos were still alive: Jakov Stejuk, Vladimir Davydov, Vladislav Kuklya, Jakov Kaper, Zakhar Trubakov, David Budnik, Semyon Berlyand, Leonid Ostrovskij and Grigorij Iovenko;


• protocols of interrogations of Berlyant, Stejuk and Davydov published in 1991 (Babij Jar. K pyatidesyatiletiju tragedii 29, 30 sentyabrya 1941 goda, Jerusalem, 1991; "Babyn Jar (veresen' 1941 - veresen' 1943)", Ukrainskij istorychnyj zhurnal, 1991, no. 12).

Plus, Sonderkommandos' testimonies were used in different war crimes trials, such as SK1005 trial in Stuttgart in 1969; they also gave testimonies to the Extraordinary Commission. (For completeness' sake I will mention that Sonderkommandos and other witnesses were also interrogated many times since 1943, but most of these documents have been published only recently, in the 2004 volume cited previously.)

Last, but not the least, is the 1944 Soviet Extraordinary Commission report (courtesy of David Thompson), which states (p. 201, Eng. edn.):

Witnesses L. K. Ostrovsky, S. B. Berlyand, V. Yu. Davydov, Ya. A. Steyuk and I. M. Brodsky who escaped the shooting in Babi Yar on September 29, 1943 have testified the following: "As prisoners-of-war we were kept in the Syrets camp in the outskirts of Kiev. On August, 18, 100 of us were sent to Babi Yar. There we were chained into shackles and ordered to dug out and burn the bodies of Soviet citizens exterminated by the Germans [...]"

Detailed description of the process follows.

How come Mattogno did not examine this report?

"The number of bodies - 70,000 - is more than double the number shot according to the Event Report, which in itself is already hugely excessive." Mattogno's ignorance shows again. He doesn't show that the number in the German war-time documents is "hugely excessive". And it is clear that he doesn't understand that according to numerous witnesses, the ravine served as an execution site for two years since the initial massacre. So the number of corpses in the ravine should not correspond to the number of victims in the German reports, and not all of the victims were Jewish.



The real number of victims will never be known. We know from many testimonies (e.g. those published in Babij Jar book cited in the previous posting) that shootings continued for several days afterwards the initial action. How many were shot is not known. We know from testimonies that executions continued afterwards, for two years - many thousands (possibly, 20,000-25,000) of Soviet POWs were shot and buried in a nearby ditch; Gypsies, partisans, Ukrainian nationalists and others were shot in the ravine. Gas vans were also used.

We have numerous testimonies of Jewish survivors who worked in the ravine and burned the bodies. I have summed up their testimonies about the number of corpses here. As is only to be expected, there are differing estimates and details. I think it will be reasonable to estimate the minimum number of victims as 70,000. Possibly, the real number is about 100,000. It is not known how many of the victims were Jewish and how many non-Jewish. Probably, if we accept the lower estimate, the ratio is about 1:1, while with the larger estimates we have more non-Jewish victims than Jewish ones.

Later Mattogno reasserts his ignorance:

Thus, the most important material evidence for the shooting of 33,771 (or 70,000) Jews...

---

Next, Mattogno explores the issue of physical evidence. First, what should have remained:

With the data specified in the fourth chapter, the cremation of 33,771 bodies would have required approximately 4,500 tons of firewood and approximately 430 tons of wood ashes and about 190 tons of human ashes would have been generated by the process.

Let's take the data from Roberto's posting about Mattogno and Belzec (keeping in mind that it may have to be corrected in the future, if the new data arrives), and assume 100,000 bodies with an average weight of 45 kg (there were lots of children and women among the victims, though probably not as many as in Belzec). That's about 4,500 tons of corpses. 5% of that is 225 tons (if we follow Mattogno's rules). Again, accepting Roberto's generous assumptions (i.e. no regard for decomposition of corpses), the wood ashes would constitute about 360 tons. Together - 585 tons. SKs testified that they were mixing the ashes with sand and earth inside and around the ravine, and dumping it in nearby kitchengardens, fields, etc. They were working for about 40 days. I.e. on average they would have to transport and disperse around 14.6 tons of ashes per day. They were working for 12-15 hours, according to their testimonies. Assuming 12-hour working day, they had to disperse 1.2 tons of ashes per hour. Assuming 30 kg per person, they would need about 40 SKs busy with dispersing ashes - each having to disperse 30 kg per hour. And they had at least 300 people working in the ravine. These numbers are very rough, and possibly the situation was much better from a logistical POV, the wiggle room is quite large. Suppose they were always working for 15 hours. Then they would need just 32 men. Suppose they didn't need an hour to disperse 30 kg of ashes... Etc., etc., etc. So yes, it was possible to spread ashes and bones around the area. No, it wouldn't be possible to obliterate the ashes and pieces of bones completely, but then, nobody claims that it was done.

E.g. in his book Anatolij Kuznetsov describes his trip to the ravine with his friend not long after the incineration had stopped:

We knew this stream perfectly... It contained coarse-grained sand, but now for some reason it was full of white stones.

I stooped and took one to take a closer look. It was a burned piece of a bone, size of a nail, white on one side, black on the other. The stream washed away them from somewhere. [...]

So we walked for a long time over these bones, until we reached the very beginning of the ravine, where the stream disappeared - here it originated from many sources seeping from sandy layers, and that's where the bones came from.

The ravine became narrow ... and in one place the sand became gray. Suddenly we understood that were were walking on human ashes.

[...]

We walked around a little bit, found many whole bones, fresh skull (still wet) and again pieces of black ashes among the gray sand.

I picked up one piece, about two kilograms, took it with me and kept it. This is the ashes of many people, everything is mixed in it - international ashes, so to say.

(JFYI, Kuznetsov wasn't Jewish, he was half-Ukrainian, half-Russian; he escaped from USSR in 1969, taking the uncensored Babij Jar with him. The full version is extremely critical of the Stalinist regime, so, of course, it couldn't have been published in USSR in full. In a 1965 letter to Shlomo Even-Shoshan Kuznetsov wrote:

I belong neither to Zionists, nor to antisemites - both [ideologies] are equally repulsive to me, and I'm writing my story from what I think is the only right position - internationalist.

)

Now consider Mattogno's blather about the photos made by the Soviet commission:

After the Soviets had reconquered Kiev, an investigatory commission made its way to Babi Yar and took some photographs, which were immortalized in an album. Three of the photos supposedly show a first and a second "zone where the bodies were burned."[643] In another, the "remnants of the ovens and the grotto, into which the prisoners who had cremated the bodies had escaped" are allegedly shown.[644] The captions to these pictures are absurd; the only actual, clearly recognizable objects are a few rotted shoes and some rags, which were painstakingly photographed by the Soviets and were described as follows:[643]

"Remnants of shoes and pieces of clothing from Soviet citizens shot by the Germans."

Why are the captions "absurd"? Photos by themselves are not enough, and the captions provide context. Indeed, exactly because not much is "recognizable" on the photos, the captions are needed.

Thus, the most important material evidence for the shooting of 33,771 (or 70,000) Jews and the later excavation and cremation of their bodies, which was discovered at the scene of the crime by the Soviets, consisted of a few shoes and some rags! If, however, the Soviets took such great pains to document things, which had no connection with the charges, what a propaganda circus would they have put on if they had really discovered mass graves with a total of far more than a million murdered Jews (as well as countless non-Jews)? Yet such a propaganda circus failed to occur, since the Soviets found nothing, which would have been comparable to the discoveries made by the Germans in Katyn and Vinnitsa!

Suddenly Mattogno jumps from the issue of Babiy Yar to the issue of the mass graves in general, with which we have dealt here and here. In what specifically concerns Babyi Yar, there were no longer mass graves there, nothing for "propaganda circus". The focus, therefore, was on investigation of the nearby Syretsky camp, in which many unburned corpses have been found.

Not that I know of any "propaganda circus" associated with these gruesome findings.

The real circus here is deniers' treatment of the Babiy Yar massacre, which mirrors their treatment of the Holocaust in general.

Previous << Part V: Deniers and Babiy Yar massacre (3)

Next >> Part VII: Other pathetic objections to Einsatzgruppen reports

That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part V: Deniers and Babiy Yar massacre (3)

John Ball is a well-known Holocaust denier whose specialty is "analysis" of the war-time aerial photos of the Nazi camps. For an introduction to his methodology see the excellent article "See No Evil: John Ball's Blundering Air Photo Analysis". For information about Ball's professional and intellectual credibility see "John Ball: Air Photo Expert?" and "John Ball's $100,000 Challenge: Where is John Ball?".

One of Ball's arguments concerns the Babiy Yar massacre. Here's how it goes:

Read more!

ALLEGATIONS ARE THAT 33,771 CORPSES WERE BURNED IN BABI YAR RAVINE

In 1941 the babi Yar ravines were a series of dried up stream drainage channels that once drained into the Dnieper River in northwest Kiev in the Ukraine region of the Soviet Union. The upper channels had flat bottoms.

It is alleged that in 1941 on September 28th and 29th, 33,771 Jewish people from Kiev reported as ordered to the end of Melnik Street where the Jewish cemetery meets Babi Yar ravine. There they were marched in small groups to the edge of the ravine and machine gunned by Waffen-SS soldiers.

In 1943 from August 18th to September 19th, 327 workers lived in the ravine while digging up the 33,000 corpses and burning them on railroad ties doused with gasoline.

During the 1970's fill was plowed into the ravine and today there are no photos or other evidence of the crimes other than eye-witness accounts. (Ref.: _Encyclopedia of the Holocaust_, pages 113-115.)

The Kiev archives released this hazy picture in 1990 as the best known photo of the Babi Yar dried up stream channel. The victims allegedly fell in the ravine and were buried after being shot, and then two years later were dug up and burned. It is not known if any roads went down the steep walls to the flat bottom. (Ref.: Wolski, M., _Fact Sheet on the 50th Anniversary of the Babi Yar Massacre, October, 1991_)

SEPTEMBER 26th, 1943: This photo was taken one week after the end of the supposed mass cremations in the ravine. If 33,000 people were exhumed and burned, evidence of vehicle and foot traffic to supply fuel should be evident in the area where the Jewish cemetery meets Babi Yar ravine, however there is no evidence of traffic either on the end of the narrow road that proceeds to the ravine from the end of Melnik Street, or on the grass and shrubbery within or on the sides of the cemetery. [Labelled: Location of alleged shootings and cremations at edge of Jewish cemetery at Babi Yar ravine, Babi Yar ravine, orthodox cemetery, Jewish cemetery, and Melnik Street.] [Ref.: GX 3938 SG, exp. 104 & 105]

SEPTEMBER 26th, 1943: An enlargement reveals no evidence that 325 people were working in the ravine finishing the cremation of 33,000 bodies just one week earlier, for many truckloads of fuel would have had to be brought in, and there are no scars from vehicle traffic either on the grass and shrubs at the side of the Jewish cemetery or in the ravine where the bodies were supposedly burned. [Ref.: GX 3938 SG, exp. 105]

1943 AIR PHOTOS OF BABI YAR RAVINE AND THE ADJOINING JEWISH CEMETERY IN KIEV REVEAL THAT NEITHER THE SOIL NOR THE VEGETATION IS DISTURBED AS WOULD BE EXPECTED IF MATERIALS AND FUEL HAD BEEN TRANSPORTED ONE WEEK EARLIER TO HUNDREDS OF WORKERS WHO HAD DUG UP AND BURNED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF BODIES IN ONE MONTH.

(Or see here.)

Blatant factual mistakes immediately betray Ball's historical ignorance. E.g., it is known that many more than 33,000 people were buried in Babiy Yar (this will be discussed in the next posting in the series). Sonderkommandos did not stop their work on 19th September (see below; this may have been a typo in a source Ball used ("19th" instead of "29th"), but even so, it shows that Ball simply did not research the issue properly). And there is much more evidence for the massacre than simply testimonies.

Photos taken on September 26, 1943 may be examined on USHMM's site.

You can see the area "analyzed" by Ball on his site.

Here's a little exercise: compare the area examined by John Ball with the ravine on the photo. Let me make it easier for you:



OK, so Ball "missed" most of the ravine in his "analysis". For those who know deniers' methods this is not really surprising.

What scholarly sources say that people were being killed exactly in this part of the ravine? None that I know of.

The question of the exact locations of killings is somewhat controversial because during the Kurenyovka tragedy of 1961 Babiy Yar was destroyed and, it seems, the attempts to put the exact places of mass shootings on maps post-date 1961. Until then Babiy Yar, except for a brief war-time and post-war period, had been a political sore spot for Soviet officials, who even tried to gradually destroy it themselves, by dumping pulp in the ravine. And, in fact, this is what led to the tragedy which took many lives in 1961.

It can be said with certainty that people were shot in different parts of Babiy Yar (and it couldn't have been otherwise, considering the number of victims and time constraints). But on none of the plans I have seen Ball's area is claimed to be a site of shootings.

Here are several plans, to consider:

1) The plan from http://www.jewukr.org/observer/jo15_34/map_main1.php, based on several other maps and sources. Probable places of shootings (according to the site) are denoted by "1".



2) A relatively recent plan from "Kyivprojekt", on which crosses denote the probable places of shootings according to their sources.



Source: Babij Jar: chelovek, vlast', istorija, vol. 1, compiled by T. Yevstafjeva, Vitalij Nakhmanovich; Kiev, Vneshtorgizdat Ukrainy, 2004.

Here is another version of this plan (source), with changes in pre-war relief marked in red. Pre-war relief was compared with 1960 geodesic survey. I.e., this plan denotes possible areas of shootings/burial (this is because the Nazis tried to use explosives to blow up the "walls" of the ravine). It should be noted that by itself lack of changes in outlines doesn't necessarily mean that some places weren't used for executions.

3) 1969 plan with the general area of shootings established with the help of several survivors. Again, the plan was made several years after Babiy Yar has been obliterated, so don't expect absolute accuracy or completeness.



Source: Yevstafjeva, Nakhmanovich, op. cit.

To repeat: on each of the plans the information may not be complete, but none of them consider Ball's area as a place where any killings took place.

'Nuff said, really. Here we have some vile ignoramus, trying to "prove" that killing of tens of thousands did not happen, based on nothing but his own idiocy.

---

Now, what can we say about relevance of the aerial photos made on September 26, 1943? According to Sonderkommando survivor Vladimir Davydov, on September 25-26, incineration action had been almost finished. (Yevstafjeva, Nakhmanovich, op. cit., p. 148). The last phase of this action consisted of brushing things up - dismantling camouflage, leveling earth, building one last pyre (ibid.). SKs guessed that this pyre was for themselves; and probably they were correct. In any case, Sonderkommandos revolted on September 29, 1943 (exactly two years since the beginning of the massacre) and several of them managed to escape.

So, the photo was taken during the final phase, several days before the escape, and basically, this means that it is not necessary that we should see any plumes of smoke on the photos. We may find something, but then again, we may not. Both outcomes are compatible with proven history.

Are traces of activity associated with mass incineration (scarring/disturbance of earth nearby and inside the ravine) visible on the photo? It's up to the experts to decide, but it seems that to this date these photos haven't been seriously analyzed by any aerial photography experts (Ball doesn't count, sorry).

My admittedly amateurish interpretation is that a large part of the ravine is covered by shadow, so it's entirely possible that we simply can't see some interesting things that were happening at that moment. It's hard for me to tell whether there is any "scarring" from cars, etc., anywhere on the photo, but deniers surely haven't proven that there isn't any, or, if it is indeed not visible on the aerial photo, that it had to be so large-scale as to be visible. They haven't even shown how such scarring/disturbance should look like, according to analogous aerial photos. So, as they say, the ball is in their court.

Previous << Part IV: Deniers and Babiy Yar massacre (2)

Next >> Part VI: Deniers and Babiy Yar massacre (4)

More CODOH silliness

Some denier (who, for some reason, reminds me very much of k0nsl aka Haldan aka...) found an old CODOH thread (with which I have dealt here) and it seems that he wanted to say something but really couldn't, so he just spouted some nonsense.

He accuses me of selective quotation of sources, not providing any examples whatsoever. He brings up Olga Lengyel's death toll, except the death tolls given by inmates are simply irrelevant. He brings up Vrba, claiming that he admitted to being a false witness, except this, of course, is a lie, as he never did. Here's what the Veritas team had to say about Vrba:

Let's look at the testimony about "poetic license", the grounds on which Faurisson and our esteemed opponents insistently call Vrba a “self-perjuring liar”. Unlike the Negationists, who are content to draw their conclusions based on paraphrases from their friends, we would prefer to examine the court testimony itself, and highlight the passages from which it becomes clear that if there are “self-perjuring liars” around, Vrba is not one of them. We will even take the transcription of the trial records from a "Revisionist” site, www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/vrba3.html :

Q. I suggest, also, that you falsified to some extent as well, because throughout the book you referred to someone by the name of Rudolf Vrba, and you attribute the name Vrba to the conversations, and Rudi, meaning you, and in fact, there was nobody by that name in the camp, sir. Is that right?
A. That is perfectly so, but I would take a great objection against your word "falsify", because I would say, then, that the artist drawn my moustache in a different way has falsified something. This is not a document, but literature, and literature has been meant mainly for young people and it would be for young people a considerable confusion to explain to them all the methods of clandestine work and how it came that the names have to be changed. Moreover, I would have to explain my real ground and reasons why I changed my German name to the name of my native language, and this would have transferred, perhaps, a national hatred to the reader, which I wanted to avoid, against the Germans.
In other words, I used my licence of a poet, it is called licensia poetarium, to put in the book only those facts and events which will enable a young person to understand the general situation.
Q. Mm-hmmm. So for you it's poetic licence?
A. Poetic licence in this particular case.
Q. Yeah.
A. In other words, I am not bound to make of it a document, but re-creates the situation as close as possible to the truth without complicating it.

So Vrba never testified to using "poetic license" in the 1944 report, as Faurisson and our opponents would have us believe. He openly admitted to having used it in a personal memoir written twenty years after the report, where it was perfectly legitimate for him to do so, and that in regard only to details which in no way affected the accuracy of his description of events at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Apart from trying to make a fly into an elephant (another well-known “Revisionist” tactic) our opponents and their source seek to mislead their readers about the occasion, contents and object of Vrba’s statements.

Note how he doesn't give a link to the Veritas team statement, and instead chooses to misrepresent it. Perhaps this is because all links to RODOH are censored at CODOH forum? Actually, even the name "RODOH" is censored. It is automatically turned to "shills", as you can witness in the posting in question. This just shows how the CODOH bunch and Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis are afraid of the open debate.

The hapless chap then talks about Mattogno destroying this or that, but what about Mattogno himself, who has been destroyed by the HC team? To repeat his own words: "Once a source is exposed as fake and writers keep using him, aren't the writers that keep using it exposed as fake, too?"

All in all, this guy's posting amounts to one big ad hominem - he doesn't deal with a single argument at this blog. Which is only to be expected.

Ah, CODOH. For dessert, here's another nice thread:

vincentferrer
Valued contributor

[...]

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 1:13

[...]

He [Finkelstein - SR] cast a little bit of doubt on the holocaust. The Jews who control the place denied him tenure.

Personally, as a Catholic, I support this since I think Jews should not teach at private Catholic colleges.

Given that Finkelstein is an atheist, only his ethnicity is meant. "Vee arr not antisemitic!" Yeah, yeah.

Read the updates...

Update: In the same thread an old German CODOH member "Sailor" who is known as a translator of some denier texts from German into English, as an outspoken antisemite and simply as an all-around doofus, adds:

The man was booted off the forum when he lost his cool and abused people who did not agree with his views on Babi Jar.

Take away the spin, and there is the core of truth. I was debunking the deniers' guru John Ball regarding the Babij Jar issue (see the full debunking here), and my last posting, which addressed the insane ramblings of some "Turpitz", who was making some rather outrageous claims like "why did the Zionist not intervene as one of their sacred burial sites was destroyed" ("Zionists"? "Intervene"? In Soviet Union? During Stalin's reign? The boy is a babbling ignoramus) - was deleted and I was banned. When a person describes this as a matter of "disagreement", rather than outright censorship by Hargis, who is always afraid of good debunkings, you can say that the person is severely deluded, or full of it. This Eschen guy is known to be a Mattogno fan, but he never addressed the refutations of Mattogno's stuff on our blog. All he can do is whine in online forums. Same applies to Hannover-Hargis, who is simply pathetic.

Update 2: a denier lemming "Laurentz Dahl" (spanked here) brings up some irrelevancies to counter the point that "No Jew who was once inside the gas chamber in operation come out alive". He brings up Yaakov Biskowitz, claiming that the latter claimed to have seen the collapsing floor of Sobibor gas chamber. This has been already dealt with: Biskowitz explicitly said that he did not see the collapsing floor. Moreover, here are the circumstances under which he had seen the gas chambers:

When I was passing by the two larger stores in Camp 2, I detached the cart and pushed it towards Camp 3. I was supposed to leave it near the gate, but I could not hold the vehicle back. The gate opened and it pushed me inside. Since I knew I would not get out alive from there, I began to run back at top speed and managed to reach my place of work without anyone noticing.

So he was there for a few seconds, he was at a distance from the gas chambers, in a state of great panic, and later misinterpreted what he had seen in these few moments as a hollow "underneath" the chambers. Big deal! One must be a total loon to think that this "proves" anything. Besides, Biskowitz mentioned nothing about the method of murder. So he is irrelevant in this case!

Then he brings up Hersz Cukierman, whose testimony only underscores the ignorance of the Jews like Pechersky, who were outside the Totenlager, about the method used. However, inside the Totenlager the information about specifically the use of "gas" was also probably a conjecture - again, only the Nazis and "motorists" would know for certain.

For the same reason his mention of other witnesses, like Bahir and Lichtman, is absolutely irrelevant - they were outside of Totenlager, if they did repeat the "collapsing floor" story, then it probably came from Biskowitz, AND "collapsing floor" is not the method of murder, so again, irrelevancy upon irrelevancy. Kalmen Wawryk told something by a kapo? The kapo was from the same camp as Kalmen, obviously, i.e. outside of Totenlager. Even if earlier that kapo had been in the Totenlager, there is, again, no guarantee that he somehow saw what had happened inside the gas chambers.

But despite the lack of knowledge about the precise method of murder, the Sobibor survivors are still valuable witnesses, because they can testify to the very fact of murder, to the proven fact that Sobibor was the last stop for the absolute majority of the arriving transports. Indeed, as Wewryk wrote:

However, only a severely retarded person could remain ignorant of what went on there. The smoke and the smell said it all and we occasionally heard a terrified "Shma Yizroel" echo over to us from there.

"Dahl", you're even stupider than I thought.

Update 3: the denier in question responded. Well, kind of. As is only usual for CODOH deniers, he did not address a single point, thereby conceding that he has lost the argument. Instead, he wrote several ad hominem-filled paragraphs, which in effect, amount to "nyah-nyah-nyah, your behavior is childish and you fling ad hominems". Talk about pot(pie)s and kettles! So much for "open debate". Thanks for confirming that most CODOH deniers are retards, who are unable to deal with logical arguments - once again.

Update 4: Dahl responds to the comment regarding Biskowitz, but does not even link here! What a chicken. So, here's what Chicken Dahl (as I will call him from now on for refusal to link here, until he does) has to say:

Sergey Romanov (hello Sergey! since you are reading this) claims that Biskowitz did not see the collapsing floor and that anyway it's "irrelevant since the collapsing was not the murder agent". He is lying.

This is what Biskowitz actually attested to:

Q. Please understand me. You are somewhat familiar with these matters. Did you see the floor when it had opened up?

A. I did not see that ? I merely saw that underneath the gas chamber, there was a hollow which already contained bodies.

Presiding Judge Thank you, Mr. Biskowitz, you have concluded your testimony. I know you have not told us everything. But there was no alternative.

So what he claims that he did not see was the process of the floor opening up. What he claims he saw was corpses in a pit underneath the gas chamber. Which means that he claimed to have seen the floor of the gas chamber in its opened up state.

Note how Chicken Dahl does not deal with a simple fact that since the floor was not claimed to gave been a murder weapon, it is a non-example when it comes to the issue at hand. Worse yet, he accuses me of lying, but then cannot support his accusation. Let's see. What is my claim?

Biskowitz explicitly said that he did not see the collapsing floor.

How does the witness answer the question "Did you see the floor when it had opened up?"?

I did not see that - I merely saw that underneath the gas chamber, there was a hollow which already contained bodies.

So once again: he did not see the "collapsing floor" itself. I.e. exactly what I have claimed. Game, set, match. I.e., it is Chicken Dahl who is lying through his teeth, especially when he claims that Biskowitz "claimed to have seen the floor of the gas chamber in its opened up state". Biskowitz mentioned nothing about "the floor in the opened state" and nowhere in his testimony it is implied. Indeed, to have seen the bodies in a supposed pit underneath a chamber through an already opened floor, Biskowitz would have to be near the gas chambers. However, he said that he saw the pit and the hollow "from a distance". This implies that he has interpreted what he thought he had seen to be two "levels" at once, i.e. a chamber and what is underneath a chamber, which would not imply that the "collapsing floor" had to be in an open state at that moment. Taken at face value, his testimony implies that the pit underneath a chamber was exposed and could be seen from the outside (he also mentions a little train that carried the bodies, implying that the bodies would have to be unloaded from the exposed pit). The "hollow" was supposed to be visible by itself, from a distance, with or without the flooor in the open state. Now, what he really did see we will probably never know. To repeat:

So he was there for a few seconds, he was at a distance from the gas chambers, in a state of great panic, and later misinterpreted what he had seen in these few moments as a hollow "underneath" the chambers. Big deal!

Possibly, it was a heap of corpses in some small pit near the chambers, which Biskowitz, in those few panicky moments, interpreted to have a "continuation" underneath the building. Or whatever. Anyway, Chicken Dahl, you fail again. And you did not even try to address the rest of it...